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Hillary Mann Leverett, former State Department official and co-founder of The Race For Iran, discusses President Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg – essentially a ploy to boost his pro-Israel credentials ahead of the AIPAC conference; why suffering Iranians are seen as a positive sign (to Obama) that sanctions are working as intended; the significance of defining the US “red line” on Iran’s nuclear program in terms of capability instead of action; the Obama administration’s fraudulent diplomatic outreach; and how sanctions are set up to fail, sowing the seeds of war and giving the next US president a streamlined path to attack Iran.

Hillary Mann Leverett has more than 20 years of academic, legal, business, diplomatic, and policy experience working on Middle Eastern issues. In the George W. Bush Administration, she worked as Director for Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. From 2001-2003, she was one of a small number of U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida and Iraq. In the Clinton Administration, Leverett also served as Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Associate Director for Near Eastern Affairs at the National Security Council, and Special Assistant to the Ambassador at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and a Watson Fellowship, and in 1990-1991 worked in the U.S. embassies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt and Israel, and was part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.

Ms. Leverett has published extensively on Iran as well as on other Middle Eastern, Central and South Asian, and Russian issues. She has spoken about U.S.-Iranian relations at Harvard, MIT, the National Defense University, NYU, the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, and major research centers in China. She has appeared on news and public affairs programs on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Al Jazeera (Arabic and English), and was featured in the highly acclaimed BBC documentary, Iran and the West. Along with Flynt Leverett, she appeared in the PBS Frontline documentary, “Showdown With Iran”, and was profiled in Esquire magazine. She has provided expert testimony to the U.S. House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

Ms. Leverett is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Brandeis University. She also studied at the American University in Cairo and Tel Aviv University. She currently teaches foreign policy at the American University in Washington D.C.

Eight former high-ranking military, intelligence and State Department officials took out an ad in the Washington Post today stating:

"NIAC opposes a war with Iran because it would
be detrimental to U.S. national interest and likely
prolong the reign of the current Iranian government"

LIGHT
Only if our “national interests” were to plunder by imperial wars of aggression, only then could the above statement be correct.

But what is in our nation’s best interest, our moral standing in the eyes of the world, this is most certainly not bombing babies in Iran. For Iran holds the moral high ground, with its no-nukes military and non-aggression foreign policy, and any violence we inflict upon Iran will only bring ten times greater violence down upon us in the not too distant future.

Valeria Plame hosted a book salon on firedoglake awhile ago. As she was much more famous than the author (forget who he was), she got more Qs than him. She asserted in the course of the salon that Iran DID have a nuke weapons program. I think the movie about her also asserted the same thing but I don't remember. When I challenged her wrt whether she was talking about the 'smoking laptop,' she ignored my Q.

If evil people will bomb babies to gratify desires to do evil, then logically there must also be good people that will die to prevent such evil. It has to be, otherwise this world would have been pure corruption since the beginning of civilization.

When the negotiations with Israel get tough, perhaps the president should remind Netanyahu of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1973. Not content to strafe and rocket the ship, the Israeli air force resorted to strafing the US sailors who had taken to life boats. If anything should demonstrate to Obama that Israel doesn't give a s..t about the US, except and only when they can be used to further the goals of Israel, the USS Liberty speaks volumes. President Obama should tell the Israelis to go straight go to hell.

Obama wouldn't have the backbone to tell Israel that – or to mention the USS Liberty – at any time, but especially not in an election year. Although the Republican candidates are looking so weak that he might not have to grovel as much as candidates usually do…

It's amazing that the American public can be convinced – with absolutely no evidence – that Iran is a threat to them, or even that Iran is violating agreements on nuclear programs. I'm not at all a fan of Iran, but they've declared their nuclear program, are submitting to inspections, and are not bothering anyone. Israel, on the other hand…

Hillary Mann Leverett seems very knowledgeable about Iran, and the interview was very informative, but she doesn't understand the Arab Gulf states if she thinks that the majority Sunni population sees Iran as some defender of Muslims and that they would support Iran over their own governments. The Gulf is not Tunisia or Libya or Syria; for the most part, the governments actually take care of their citizens, and while the citizens may have complaints, they are not agitating to overthrow their leaders – and certainly not for the Iranian leadership.

You lier ummabdulla!! You don’t know much about your own people or your religion or history!
Sitting in your Mansion under GE-aircondition, you think you know what majority of A-rab (a-rab=non-rabbi yes you are also jooz, look up Sham) think?
Get real! Pick up some book and read or ask yor chauffeur to take your were the poor of people live!

What kind of proof do you want? Look at the situation of the citizens of Libya as compared to the citizens of Gulf countries, for example. With all that oil and a small population (only about 6 million), Qaddafi could have provided the people with good schools, health care, education, housing, etc. Besides that, his system was brutal in a way that the Gulf countries aren't, and people were terrified to even criticize him.

As for the Sunni Arab citizens of the Gulf taking sides with a Persian, Shia 'Ayatollah' against their leaders, the idea is absurd.

Hilary & her husband are really looking for a job at State Department. These uninformed and non-sense arguments they bring up is to that end; essentially saying: Hay, we are here, and have "knowledge" of Iran afairs, why don't you hire us?

Whatever the current "government" in Iran says is almost 80% intentional lies; BTW, so was the Khomeini himself. Either Hilary and her husband are unaware of these lies (because they cannot read or speak Farsi) or intentionally are repeating these lies in support of themselves to the end I indicated above. They should educate themselves much better if they like to become Iranian diplomatic experts, and then talk

Why do you attack the messenger (adhominem)? Can you critic Hilary for the content of what she said? Also can you name or prove any other government that do not intentionally lie? There are millions who can’t read English but they do see and understand the USrael lies, all 100% of it!
Don’t you have a MEK meeting to attend? Just kidding, stay here you may learn something.

What stikes me is that Escot and Hillary (incompliance) still maintain that 19 A-rab(bi)s were people responsible for september 11.
There’s no proof of that, yet they keep repeating it as thoght it was as clear as the atrocity of israely 2008 genocide.
Wat you Tinkk Escot?

Its clear to anybody by now "US and Zionist Knessets" are the real "Axis of Evil" on planet Earth. Zionism with its "child" Israel always represented treat to World Peace and will remain greatest danger to Whole Humanity till the day people "Burry this colonial, rasist ideology deep under the ground forever". Short reign of Zionist terror /over 60 years/ was needed so mankind can identifi truth face of Masters of World Terrorism and from Palestine suffering learn what would be life on planet if this atheistic, brutal ideology was to succed over Whole World – their NWO.

peter votja, you were on the right track till you hit your religious wall!
What makes you think atheism is negative, and equal to ‘brutal ideology’.
One thing is for sure, if you do that you do not know god at all ; my good fellow.

The underlying assumption that is always at work here is that Israelis fear another mass killing of Jews, a destruction similar to ones in the past. It is only fair to point out that this now-famous genocide in Germany did not exactly come out of nowhere. The destruction of both the first and second Temples was not, according to Jewish writers, a tragedy arising from the black hearts of the Assyrians and Babylonians but the inevitable fall-out from Israel's arrogant, unwise, and negligent actions. The prophets had specifically warned the Jews not to place their trust in foreign allies. When Hitler came to power, the Germans had just seen a gang of secular Jews in Russia take over the government and murder the entire upper class; Marx wrote the script and Lenin led the fight. The control that Jews had over the banks, stock market, press, and academia in Germany before the Second World War was very similar to what we see now in the United States; more than 1200 of fewer than 1500 seats on the Berlin Stock Exchange when it crashed were in Jewish hands, and they wrote, produced and directed most of those dark, cynical movies that Germany was producing in the 1920s. The reaction was certainly overkill, but the Germans had every right to be both angry and frightened, and given their level of control, for many years it had been impossible for intellectuals to discuss rising Jewish power in public, before a demagogue was swept into power. It is also worth noting, since secular Jews are always promoting feminism, that the first thing that German women did after getting the vote was to elect Hitler. Would we have had the filth and on-going dangers of the nuclear industries polluting the planet without Einstein, Teller, and Oppenheimer, who built their bombs in secret in order to drop them on Germans?

We are seldom reminded that it was the Shah of Iran, who sent the Jews back to Jerusalem, ending their Babylonian captivity in 523 BC; according to the Torah, out of respect for the Jews he paid to have them taken back and their kingdom restored. Secular Jews like Netanyahu can play fast and lose like this with history only because Jews are the only ones who really take history seriously and know what happened; the gentiles live in a mythic, timeless Valhalla where all that matters is what the herd thinks now. Does it not seem strange that over and over and over we hear about "The Holocaust," and how bad bad bad were those Germans, but we never hear a word about the much larger numbers of Chinese peasants murdered by Mao, who was operating under theories set down by Marx, a secular Jew. Nobody remembers how threatened the United States was by the prospect of a Communist South Vietnam; Americans were little embarrassed to find that once accomplished Communism in Vietnam did not much matter.

Various human survival strategies all have their positive and negative characteristics, and many groups have hostile and conflicted interactions, but we have seen this particular gentile-Jewish interaction over a burst financial bubble play itself out before, and unless steps are taken to change course, when the dollar crashes Jews in America and Israel are likely to fall on very hard times, again. Netanyahu's arrogance will have made it worse. Go read Josephus's The Jewish War. Go read that account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, as any literate person in the West should already have done. It was written by a Jew from a priestly family, and from that story we can discern quite clearly what is coming again and why.